Mr. Splitfoot - Hardcover

Hunt, Samantha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544526708 ISBN 13: 9780544526709

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016

Synopsis

A contemporary gothic from an author in the company of Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, Mr. Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.

Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who — or what — has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?   In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.   Making good on the extraordinary acclaim for her previous books, Samantha Hunt continues to be “dazzling” (Vanity Fair) and to deliver fiction that is “daring and delicious” (Chicago Tribune).

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Mr. Splitfoot

“Samantha Hunt is astonishing. Her every sentence electrifies. Her characters demand our closest attention. Her new book contains everything that I want in a novel. If I could long-distance mesmerize you, dear reader, into picking up this book and buying it and reading it at once, believe me: I would.”
– Kelly Link

“I'm speechless. Mr. Splitfoot is so inventive, so new; I haven’t read anything like it in years. On the surface it's about false spirituality and the most demented road trip across New York State ever attempted, but it’s also about the horrible ties that bind us and the small acts of redemption that make life almost okay. On top of that, it’s a thrilling page-turner. I couldn’t stop reading it.” – Gary Shteyngart

“Mr. Splitfoot is lyrical, echoing, deeply strange, with a quality of sustained hallucination. It is the best book on communicating with the dead since William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley, but it swaps out that novel’s cynicism for a more life-affirming sense of uncertainty.”
– Luc Sante

“Mr. Splitfoot is an absolutely thrilling book. Filial and maternal love are on display in all their complicated hugeness. But Hunt gives us plenty of humor amid the horror and awe — and then turns on the lights and shows us what was looming above us the whole time. I can't stop thinking about it.”
– Sarah Manguso
 
 
 

From the Inside Flap:

Ruth and Nat are seventeen. They are orphans. And they are developing an uncanny ability to talk to the dead. These talents bring them into the orbit of Mr. Bell, a con man with his own mystical interests. Together they embark on an unexpected journey that connects meteor sites, utopian communities, lost mothers, and the scar that maps its way across Ruth’s face.
 
Decades later and after years of absence, Ruth visits her niece, Cora. But while Ruth used to speak to the dead, she now won’t speak at all. It seems, though, that she has arrived just in time. Cora is in trouble — single and pregnant and not sure what is in store for her. Aunt Ruth has a plan, even if she’s not telling. Cora knows she must follow. Their journey becomes an odyssey. But where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been all these years? Why won’t she talk? And who — or what — is hidden in the woods at the end of the road? 
  
A subversive ghost story that is as haunting in its examination of family, motherhood, and love as it is in its conjuring of the otherworldly, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your imagination aflame. Unwinding in an ingenious structure, it tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious, explosive reckoning. A contemporary gothic, it is “a truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.”*
 
*Kirkus Reviews, starred review 

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0544526708
• ISBN 13: 9780544526709
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336